Joshua Davis: changing the model of longform journalism, one Hollywood epic at a time | Wired 2013 video

Joshua Davis wants to change the model of longform
journalism. Having sumo wrestled down the road from the White
House, come fourth (out of four) in the US wrestling championship
and watched John McAfee hold a loaded gun to his head in true
modern American outlaw-style, he's not all that intimidated at the
prospect.

In fact it was McAfee's decidedly horrifying, yet
challenging antics, that drove Davis to question the norms of
traditional media, where freelancers hunt down huge stories at
their own expense in the hope of a pay-off.

"I'd spent a good deal of last year living with John
in Belize. He was trying to convince me he was an anti-corruption
crusader," Davis told the audience at Wired 2013. "I
didn't find that. I found people were quite scared of him. I went
to his island compound to confront him with all my research and he
was very upset. He had a gun strapped to his chest, and he dropped
the bullets out, then chambered just one. He closes the chamber,
spins it, and puts the gun to his head.

"He starts pulling the trigger -- click -- 'what you
think is reality' -- click -- 'may not' -- click -- 'be' -- click
-- 'reality'… 'you are operating on an assumption' -- then he
click, click, clicked through them all and finished -- 'of reality
that's wrong. You think this is a trick?' he asked, then shoots
into the sand right next to me.

"That's when I realised I had to leave Belize."

It wasn't the only thing he realised. Watching a man
with a prolific and reputable three-decade career, holed up in a
Belizean compound and convinced the police were conspiring against
him, was enough to make Davis question the things he'd taken for
granted in life.

"I reconsidered my assumptions about reality and my
career. I thought, maybe the stories I write don't just have to be
magazine stories. I was friends with Joshuah
Bearman, another Wired writer who wrote the article
that got turned into [the movie] Argo. We're both
very interested in the same types of stories -- dramatic true
stories that seem to be all over the place."

It's what Davis had done with the McAfee story, and
really what he'd been doing throughout his entire career. His
unorthodox entry into journalism began when he decided to travel
hundreds of miles to take part in the US wrestling championship in
Nevada, having never won a match in his life. (He still hasn't.)
It's the same fearlessness that led him to try sumo wrestling and
skijoring, a bizarre sport where ski-clad participants are dragged
behind a horse over obstacles. These were some of the first stories
he was commissioned to write for consumer publications. It was
these types of underdog stories he continued to be attracted to
writing, including one about a high school team that beat MIT to
first place in developing an underwater robot.

"That blew me away, the underdog mentality. That
there's no reason you should't get in the pool and try building
that. This is how my thinking as a storyteller began." Like
Argo, that article is now being turned into a film, La
Vida Robot.

"To get these true stories we travel round the world,
and most publications have a limited space for in-depth stories. I
just want to find these long stores and publish them." That's what
he and Bearman are doing with their new joint venture, Epic. Bearman and Davis
are some of the lucky few that attracted the attention of Hollywood
with their stories, and could be in a position to spend many more
months researching new epics, because of that. With Epic,
writers can explore and publish extraordinary non-fiction stories
online with no constraints on space, that will then have the
opportunity to be read and maybe even optioned by Hollywood
producers.

"We find these stories and they're not just longform
narrative pieces, but can live as films, blogposts, podcasts. Part
of the idea is we will have an entire world surrounding these
stories. All income streams that feed out go into sending
journalists to chase these stories -- something that's not easy and
is expensive.

"How do you support that in the 21st century? This is
a shot at trying to do that."